Thoughts from a Part-Core Gamer

Two Nights in Siege

The new patch has been – interesting. I’m not as big a fan of the Timeless Isle as it seems I should be, judging from others perception of it, but it certainly did help me gear my paladin up quickly. In an hour or two, I went from unable to enter and LFR to able to enter ToT. However, after that 2 hours, things got a lot less interesting.

More interesting, though, has been our first nights in Flex. We’ve done two nights in there, and it’s been nicely challenging on average. The first boss took a little learning, but only a little. We got him down pretty quickly using a bit better of a spread of dps and really emphasizing healing towards the end of the fight. It was nicely complex, and I look forward to seeing it in normal.

The second fight we one-shotted. I’m not sure if we got lucky, were just used to council fights, or whether it’s mindlessly easy, but it was. We talked strat, prepared, and executed with near perfection.

Then we hit Norushen and got stuck. I’m not sure if it was the raid comp, too low heals, too low dps, or what, but we got him to the enrage timer repeatedly but couldn’t quite seal the deal. Now I’m not at all averse to glass chewing, and I like pondering the strategies and where we can tighten up our performance, but damn. After the ease of the council fight, it was a slap in the face, which, of course, is occasionally needed to snap people back to reality.

From what was said before the raid, if I understood it correctly, it sounded like the leadership thought we’d be strolling through flex like it was LFR. The statement – and I could see another interpretation – but the statement was “Tonight, we’ll go into flex. When we clear it, we’ll go into ToT. Tomorrow, we’ll continue in ToT.”

Well. I didn’t think it would be so easy, and it wasn’t. I’m glad, too, because having no challenge would make raiding pointless. I like getting stuck, to a point, of course, and we have been making slow progress with most pulls.

We didn’t down him the first night, or the second, either. We’ve got him to around 5% before the enrage timer, but that was by far the best attempt. After we banged our heads for most of the raid, the officers put out a clear message about flasking, eating, and even proper ilevels. They were clearly right, too, as when we added three dps, while once we did have our best attempt, we also clearly had several dps who simply weren’t putting out enough to make up for their attendance.

And in the end, I’m okay with that. I’m for the inclusion. But there has to be a limit, because if the inclusion ends up flat-out preventing the raid from being successful, then it’s preventing the mission of the organization as a whole.

I’m pretty sure we’ll get him next time, and I even suspect that a good 10 man team from our guild could get him in a few pulls.

I’m looking forward to next time!

Stubborn (and excited)

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Norushen is FAR more about mechanics than raw numbers, despite what it might seem like. You really need to manage Corruption correctly – a person with 0 corruption will do 2.5 times the damage of someone with 75 corruption (what you start with). You want at least several (or all) of the DPS with 0 corruption and tanks soaking the puddles – ideally have a person soak a puddle and go from 75 to 100 corruption right before they go to be cleansed.

This also means the DPS numbers are going to be wildly skewed.

Ideally send down your best DPS first so they get to DPS the boss the entire time with 0 corruption. Have people with corruption kill adds. Stop sending people down sub 50% and burn the boss (4 more adds will spawn that still need to be soaked, ideally by tanks or the weakest DPS).

I’m not sure how many people you went into Flex with, but it’s an interesting point how “dps who simply weren’t putting out enough to make up for their attendance” becomes literally true given the nature of content scaling in Flex. Every person beyond the 10 standard are going to have to contribute more than they make the fight harder by the boss attacks/HP/mechanics scaling, else they shouldn’t be in there.

“Every person beyond the 10 standard are going to have to contribute more than they make the fight harder by the boss attacks/HP/mechanics scaling, else they shouldn’t be in there.”

Except it’s designed so that adding more people makes it easier.

For example, let’s say a boss requires 100k per DPS with 10 people. If you add another DPS, they only have to contribute 95k. Another DPS, maybe 90k. And so on. It is deliberately designed to make it easier with more people in order to discourage people from removing the weakest link(s) unless they’re truly awful.

I think you’re both a bit wrong on that. Bringing in an extra dps will likely make the average dps requirement a bit lower but it will make the tanking and healing requirements a bit higher. However, bringing in an extra HEALER will INCREASE the dps requirement… so you can’t make the general statement that adding more people makes it easier or harder. Adding a person makes THEIR role easier but makes OTHER roles harder. On average, adding a body should make the overall encounter stay roughly the same, otherwise 25 would be hugely easier than 10. I’ve done both on flex (well, 13 and 24) and in my experience, it wasn’t, they seemed to be tuned pretty similarly in terms of the average requirements. My smaller run had a bunch of quality normal raiders, the larger run had a mix of heroic raiders and scrubs. Average performance numbers were probably similar between the two.

The 24-man run got stuck on the 3rd boss on the weekend, it took a couple of hours and a few players switching to their (heroic geared) mains and dropping a few of the unacceptable performers (16K, even with a 50% debuff? C’mon…) just to finally get it. They only had about 6 dps uncorrupted by the 50% burn so we were leaving a TON of dps on the table and were having enrage issues. Focusing so much on dps was leaving us short of healers which meant we had people dying here and there, making it even more difficult. As @Balkoth says originally, the mechanics are the key on that fight. We eventually brute-forced it rather than modifying the strategy, not sure why they decided to go that route.

My first run, the 13-man, was was a 2-shot (first attempt was pretty much just a “let’s see what happens”) but we were putting dps inside significantly faster, our goal was to have all dps be uncorrupted by 50%. I believe we had more mobs to deal with on the outside but with more uncorrupted folks, they died a lot faster so it actually felt like we had FEWER. There are probably consequences of that (more puddles to be soaked, maybe?) but it definitely ended up in a better result and the two groups were of relatively similar quality. The larger group did have a few significantly underperforming dps but they weren’t the difference between early success and much failure. Strategy is king on that one. Also helps if the low dpsers don’t, against instruction, go into the early portals on each attempt so their dps doesn’t look quite so bad. I think some of them were treating Flex like LFR where they could do what they wanted. They cost us a lot of time/repair bills with that attitude. It’s real raiding.